Cavan's Rose hits out at Tralee stage crasher

The Fathers4Justice campaigner who stormed the Rose of Tralee stage interrupting Cavan's Lisa Reilly in the process, has said he did it in a bid to highlight the inequality and lack of rights facing fathers and fathers-to-be.

In an opinion piece published in today's Irish Examiner, Fathers4Justice group founder, Matt O'Connor, from Clapham, London, warned too that his protest was the start of an escalation of his group's campaign.

'Imagine the outrage if 100,000 Irish children were denied access to their mothers in this way and imagine the outcry if mums had no right in law to see their children and they had to battle through secret family courts to see them?' he wrote.

But Ballinagh's Lisa told this week's Anglo-Celt, which hit shelves this morning, that when the frightening on-air incident occurred, she herself thought of her own father in audience watching on, and how he might feel.

“He was talking about fathers- it wasn't nice for my father to be sitting in the audience seeing his daughter's achievements being belittled and seeing how upset I was and comforting me afterwards.”

 

See this week's newspaper for full report and interview with Cavan Rose 2016, Lisa O'Reilly...